He feels a sudden emptiness when the blackout strikes his building. The air conditioner sighs off. The room instantly warms. His computers and servers continue to glow, now powered by backup batteries that can only last so long. Undertown demands uninterrupted service, and for now, they have it.
He leans into the telescope again. The building across the street is unlit and gives nothing back. He doesn’t like to think about what might be happening over there, what secrets he might miss out on. He closes his eyes and counts to a hundred. The computer and server fans moan. Sweat beads on his forehead.
He opens his eyes and still the city remains dark, as if a black blanket were tossed over it, and he counts to one hundred again. Lightning webs the sky, strobing his view of downtown. It makes sparkling nests on the roofs of the two highest buildings, Wells Fargo and Big Pink, the U.S. Bancorp Tower. The thunder is continuous now, a muttering and booming, like some furious conversation heard through a wall.
Lightning strikes the Broadway Bridge and outlines it blue. And then, as if some spark has taken hold and flared into fire, the city erupts with light. The grid-work pattern of the streets illuminates like circuit boards. The air conditioner sputters to life again, and he sighs his relief along with it.
Then the power returns all over the city. A spike. The lights in the buildings all around him flicker and blaze hot. A few apartments flame out, go dark. A streetlamp explodes with a sparking rain.
He can hear the surge muscling its way through his system. There is a flare. One of the servers spits and flashes and smokes, and when he goes to investigate it a moment later, he discovers the drive destroyed.
?
The Internet is his home. Some people might call it a fantasy world, because it is not something you can smell or taste or run through your fingers like black sand, but it is every bit as real as anything we experience. He can vividly remember nightmares he had as a child—a shadow man who stood in the corner of his bedroom, a gathering of thin bears that surrounded a picnic—far more vividly than the lunch he ate yesterday. They’re as real as anything. The Internet is as real as anything. If, in his mind, he has spent hours with a woman—cupped her breast, tasted her spit, snapped the lace band of her panties, both their bodies shuddering with pleasure—and the hours add up to days and then weeks, how is that not real? If he feels something, if his mind is cavernous and pliant enough to be stimulated so?
The Internet has trapdoors and invisible wires. It has secret passages, secret paths and secret codes, secret languages. It has vaults and cellars and attics full of darkness no spotlight can cut through. You can travel through time, you can travel through walls. With a trembling of your fingers, you can make things appear and disappear. You can hurt people. You can help people. You can buy people. The Internet is a landfill and a treasure trove. Every object and every person and every place and every thought, every secret exists there. Every appetite can be satisfied there. Unlike a body, unlike the world, the Internet is limitless.
It is where he belongs. Not here, on the streets, in the rain, splashing through puddles and dashing from awning to awning, heading to the tech store a mile away. His hair plasters his scalp and water runs down his collar. He gathers up the hood of his jacket. Across the street, a lamp throws a funnel of rain-swept light. In it stands a figure. A man. The one who sometimes preaches on street corners—Cheston believes—the one lumped with warts. He wears what looks like several black trash bags, torn through to accommodate his arms and legs, one of them hooding his head. His shape is made more uncertain by the wind that rips against his body and makes the bags flutter. Cheston cannot see a face, but he can feel eyes, and they are tracking him.
He hurries on. He shivers and jams his hands deep in his pockets and every few steps glances back the way he came. His hood eats up so much of his vision, giving him only a periscope to see through rounded by darkness. The first three times he turns, the bag man remains beneath the streetlamp, but when Cheston spins around again, he is gone. Cheston pulls off his sunglasses to see better, bites down on the stem of them.
He hurries faster still. Not only for the bag man and the dark and the rain, but for Undertown. This is Friday evening, when people return home from a long week at work and loosen their ties and their belts. They have an appetite. They want to indulge. Traffic on his servers multiplies. He has never met any of his employers, but Cloven’s voice frightens him. It sounds like it is coming from the bottom of a well. And his employer has been clear on this one matter: the servers should never fail. He must keep the caverns open. If something goes wrong, Cheston will be held responsible.
It is only a block now to the tech store, GEEK. The letters on the sign glow red in the night, the four windows a blazing white beneath them. He hates fluorescent light. Its color the color of hospitals and police stations. It makes his eyes flutter. Brings on a headache. But this evening he feels nothing but relief when he pushes through the door.
A chime fills the store and slowly bottoms out. The color white is everywhere. White light, white drop ceiling, white tile floor, white metal shelving. It penetrates him. He hurries on his sunglasses and they instantly fog over. He pulls them off again to smear clean. He squints at the counter, abandoned, and then down the aisles, empty as well. He calls out, “Hello?” He pulls back his hood. Rain drips off him and patters the entry rug. The counter next to the register is dirty with Mountain Dew bottles and fast-food wrappers, a nest of wires, a motherboard. Cheston holds his hand over a soldering iron that still gives off heat. Through the center of the store reach six long aisles. At the back, three tables display desktops and laptops and printers. Cheston walks the width of the room, glancing down the aisles, each of them a corridor of ink cartridges and controllers and processors and video cards, spools of cords, blister packs of flash drives.
In the last of them stands Derek, who owns the shop and lives in the basement below. He is short, the size of a twelve-year-old, though he might be forty. Doc Martens, the style with the bulky heel, cheat him a few inches. He always wears a short-sleeved polo tucked into pleated khakis with a braided leather belt. His forearms, which are exceptionally hairy, he keeps crossed across his chest. His face is clean-shaven but rashed along the neck. His hair is parted tidily down the middle with the sideburns trimmed weirdly high. “Greetings,” he says.
“What are you doing?”
He wears a smartphone in a harness on his belt. A white cord reaches across his chest and splits into his ears. He tugs on it and the earbuds pop out, and he wraps them around his knuckles and tucks them in his pocket. “What’s that?”